Documents uncovered from a recent Senate Republican Caucus investigation cited and independently verified for a joint investigative report by ProPublica and Vanity Fair reveal that the problems with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) were much deeper than originally known.

New: The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known, documents unearthed by a Senate team reveal. Tracing the evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica give the clearest view yet of a biocomplex in crisis. https://t.co/2UWbXsF1sK

— ProPublica (@propublica) October 28, 2022

Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.

The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program.

Using evidence traced by the Republican Senators’ report, suggests the coronavirus likely did escape from the Wuhan lab and Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally covered it up. While no smoking gun was found, the reporters construct a fascinating case that there was a major security mishap in the Wuhan lab during November, 2019 that could contribute to the leak of something such as COVID-19.

PHOTO CREDIT: Wuhan Institute of Virology is a research institute by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jiangxia District, south of the Wuhan city, Hubei province, China. By Ureem2805 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91054329

ADDENDUM 10/30/2022: This quoted information was replaced to take into account material in the ProPublica article that better made the point of this post.